It should be easy to love independent bookshops, with their olde worlde charm and their suggestion of a life where there's time to potter among the shelves and discover a beautiful, life-affirming novel. The convenience of click-and-deliver shopping is hard to resist, but for a brief moment last night, at a debate for Independent Booksellers Week, a world where browsing a bookshop could be an everyday pleasure seemed possible.

Top of the agenda was the economic reality of trying to make a living from running an indie on the high street. Nic Bottomley, the owner of the award-winning Bath bookshop Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, trumpeted a 13-point manifesto for independent success:

1. Do one thing differently every week.
2. Tell everyone what you're doing. Tell customers what's happening at your shop; tell publishers which of their books you're selling hard; tell the press anything remotely interesting. It will come back to help you.
3. Never pay for advertising.
4. Copy good ideas from other geographically-distant independent businesses.
5. Inspire 10 book lovers every day; convert one book-agnostic every day.
6. Surround yourself with creative booksellers who love books as much as you and can wax on about them even more persuasively than you.
7. Use social media.
8. Use the time you were going to spend bitching about Amazon to work out, realistically, what your business needs from publishers. Tell the publishers.
9. Create a community. Hold events and book groups that are so good people will attend even if they've never heard of the author and that afterwards they'll rave about to everyone they know.
10. Don't give excellent customer service. Give extreme customer service – so that you become part of the fabric of your customers' lives. They will do your advertising for you.
11. Sell e-readers now if you love them as much as physical books. If not, wait until the margins are plausible before you think about it and in the meantime carry on selling books.
12. Don't buy stock from Amazon.
13. Be surprisingly cut-throat and financially driven when no one is looking; aim not to survive, but to thrive.

My own personal favourite is point eight, advising the use of time saved by not lamenting the Amazon effect to woo and work with publishers. I like it because I want independent bookshops to stay on the high street, and I recognise that no amount of agonising about Amazon will make it go away. And I like point one, "do one thing differently every week", because it would be extremely cool to have a new or surprising experience every time you went into a bookshop. But what's missing from this manifesto? What's the key to success in the world of bricks and mortar bookshops?